Not a Write Off vol: 8
The one where I am in novel limbo land, I stop calling the baby a baby, and get clobbered by a plastic bucket
If you haven’t come across one of these posts before, let me give you a quick tour. It’s the less polished recap of the past month, a bit like a diary entry. Imagine we’ve found some shade in a park and I’ve cracked out two mango flavoured Rubicons for us to sup. Links to recent posts, workshops, and mentoring opportunities are at the end.
You know what I didn’t expect, not in a million years? That I would be able to work and write to a soundtrack of intense, assaulting gym music. I can drown it out, focus on the words, and when I want to, eavesdrop on the conversations of people around me who talk about oblique muscles and their protein intake. Anyone who works freelance will know that finding a decent place to prop you laptop when you can’t work in the house is a mission of Holy Grail proportions. Friends, let me tell you a secret. Gym cafés. More often than not, they don’t require you to have a membership, the internet is good, and people generally leave you alone.
I have edited short stories from gym cafés, mentored from gym cafés, gossiped with my writer friends from gym cafés, and drafted chapters of my novel from gym cafés. It turns out that my perfect gym visit is one where I am approximately twelve foot and a wall away from any equipment.
This volume has been in the works since I returned here, to my newsletter, after handing my fourth novel in to my editor. I’m waiting on the edits and in the meantime, ticking off the life admin that I have put off for months and months. I weeded the garden. I did my tax return nine months early. I have been preparing for a role that I’m taking on in September: my dream job, really. I went to a spa with a friend to celebrate successfully raising a baby to the toddler stage. I came back with strep throat.
Don’t get me wrong, the spa was amazing. I was either in water or near water all day, took my book into a sauna, and fell asleep on a water bed for almost two hours, which I have since realised equates to paying £30 for a nap. I’m convinced that if you surveyed mothers, £30 would be considered more than reasonable for sensory deprivation. Perhaps there’s a market in that.
More than anything, I’m feeling excited for the next year. There’s always a tiny part of my lizard brain that says ‘HA! Now you’ve communicated HOPE out loud I’m going to do my best to RUIN it,’ but that isn’t logical. I write main characters, but I am not the world’s main character. It isn’t out to get me. Besides, how can a vindictive God exist when there’s a new series of Below Deck to watch every three months?
I’m going to announce a few changes to the way I roll out content on here, which sounds more dramatic than it is in reality. I’m going to be really busy really soon and need to be more present in some places and more obscure in others. Anyway, I’ve penned news below, some recommendations, and very early thoughts on what I’m writing next. Enjoy, pals.
The novel…
Okay, so I did make a big bold claim in my last post about the fact that I had finished my book. The truth of it is that you finish a book a number of times (do you ever finish it, truly?) and although I did write ‘The End,’ as you are accustomed to do before deleting it and sending it off again, it isn’t finished finished. I handed in something which was akin to a 2.5 draft. I rewrote the whole thing in a different POV, cut out some hefty chapters that felt a little gratuitous and silly, and pulled out phrases that lacked clarity. Some dialogue exchanges read like I’d written them whilst high on space cake except it wasn’t space, it was the witching hours of mid-winter and it wasn’t cake, it was sleep deprivation.
All that to say that I’m in a limbo of sweet, sweet ignorance until my editor gets back to me with notes and then I’ll work at those before we go to a copy edit. What this looks like is me trying to group edits by character, sub-plot, or task. I sift things out of my manuscript, inspect them under a magnifying glass, and ask them to prove why they deserve to go back in.
In the past, I’ve had developmental edits that have taken me six weeks to do comfortably (whilst working a regular job three days a week). On the flipside, with another book, it took me seven months to get the edits done because the changes felt vast and I was juggling far more than was realistic. Each book is a different beast. I am a different writer now. A little more sage. A little less precious. A little more experienced about what readers like from me and what pisses them off.
If you’d like to see how I spent my first proper day off after I turned in the manuscript, you can watch it in sixty seconds here.
